In Asheville, N.C., music is everywhere. From church bells and buskers to pipe organs and drum circles, the city pulses with soundtracks as different as the experiences it has to offer.

On a warm summer night, I could hear the drums from blocks away. Instead of a steady bum-bum, though, the sounds drifting through Asheville’s downtown core made an exuberant cacophony: the thump-a-thump of hands slapping djembes, the ching-ca-ching of tambourines, the dong-dong of a cowbell and the shuff-a-shuff of shakers and the broo-roo of a didgeridoo, plus the sound of many hands clapping. It’s all part of the 8-year-old Friday-night drum circle that takes place in Pritchard Park, a little landscaped triangle in the middle of this western North Carolina city.

On brick steps and boulders ringing the park sat silver-haired matrons in preppy knits, young Rastafarians in dreadlocks, elderly Asian ladies, bearded white men in dashikis, young kids with their parents and teenagers in flip-flops. In the center of the park, a handful of drummers manned huge kettle drums, and others shared congas or passed around beaded gourds, wooden blocks and bells. Dancers twirled, swayed and bounced in the warm summer breeze.

Just around the corner, a musical duo of another sort was churning out its own melodies, seemingly oblivious to the drumming ricocheting off the art deco, beaux-arts and baroque buildings. On an accordion and a euphonium, two young men played plaintive strains that would have spurred Edith Piaf to break into song.

Most visitors to Asheville, though, aren’t there for the music. Roughly half of the city’s 2 million yearly visitors trek there to see the biggest private home in America, George Vanderbilt’s palatial Biltmore estate.

The 1895 mansion and grounds are a product of the Vanderbilt family’s railroad fortune, George’s insatiable appetite for luxury and an astounding team of planners and visionaries, including architect Richard Morris Hunt and Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect whose design of Central Park in New York was merely practice for his largest (and last) undertaking: transforming a 125,000-acre swath of deforested North Carolina countryside into lush gardens and managed forest, 8,000 acres of which are still Biltmore property.

The house alone — with its 250 rooms, including 34 bedrooms and 43 bathrooms — has four acres of floor space, much of which is open to the public for a hefty admission price. After coughing up $55 for a ticket and paying an extra $10 for the audio tour, I started out in the house’s crowded foyer along with hundreds of other Saturday day-trippers there to ogle Vanderbilt’s ostentatious creation. I was fully prepared to be offended by the sheer wastefulness, the greed, the pomposity of the place.

Then something funny happened: As I toured the house, I started actually liking George, his wife, Edith, and their daughter, Cornelia. I gaped at their Flemish tapestries, Renoirs and Sargents and Whistlers and the library with 10,000 volumes, and I pored over exhibits on the restoration of a suite of rooms just opened to the public this summer.

Meanwhile, the stories emerged: about the youngest son of a robber baron who fell in love with the mountains and built a French-style chateau on a hilltop; about a community of architects, builders and artists who erected that mammoth building; about men and women inspired by Vanderbilt’s vision who, in turn, followed their own dreams. Three years after Biltmore opened, Carl Schenck established the country’s first forestry school nearby; after George’s death in 1914, Edith championed local artists and artisans; many craftspeople hired to work on the house decided to stay and make Asheville their home.

Rather than being a gaudy showplace wholly separate from the surrounding community, it seems that Biltmore and its owners not only gave tourists a reason to visit Asheville — Cornelia opened the house to the public in 1930 at the request of the tourism- dollar-starved Asheville government — but also jump- started some of the businesses and industries that still thrive nearby.

Despite the carefully orchestrated Biltmore experience, the house can still surprise visitors with an unexpected song. A few minutes into my audio tour, I was in the billiards room when the voice in my headset was suddenly drowned out by a familiar tune: “Da-da-da DUM dum, da-da-da DUM dum” — “The Ride of the Valkyries” booming from a giant pipe organ. I took off my headphones to listen to the song, and a friendly docent in the banquet hall explained that the organ had always been a player organ, but now it’s entirely computer- programmed. Throughout the exchange, she didn’t even seem to notice that she was shouting.

One of the craftsmen hired by George Vanderbilt was a Spaniard named Rafael Guastavino. He developed a way of building self-supporting tile arches, and he created Biltmore’s 70,000-gallon indoor swimming pool, tiled in blue. After his commission, Guastavino decided to stay in North Carolina, settling near Asheville in Black Mountain, where he took projects here and there (the Duke Chapel in Durham, the Jefferson Standard Building in Greensboro) and in 1905 completed construction of Asheville’s Basilica of St. Lawrence Catholic Church, on the north end of downtown at Haywood and Flint.

’29 crash fallout

The sanctuary was cool and empty when I visited on a Monday morning. Light came through the stained-glass windows, and I studied the terra cotta figures ringing the altar. Then I looked up. The domed ceiling is made of modest materials — simple, uniform red terra cotta tiles — in the trademark Guastavino houndstooth pattern, and it’s said to be the largest free-standing elliptical dome in North America.

It’s a nice dome, and impressive work, but that boast sounds like a stretch. It reminded me of Asheville’s reputation for having the most art deco buildings (apart from Miami) in the southeastern United States. The claim to fame seems underwhelming, but it reveals something important about Asheville: Before the railroad arrived in 1880, it was mostly a hardscrabble crossroads. Then, for almost 50 years, it was a posh resort town. After the stock market crash of 1929 and the failure of Asheville’s local bank, the residents found themselves saddled with the highest per-capita debt load of any American city, and it took 50 years to recover. Those art deco and other historic buildings still stand because Asheville never saw a midcentury economic boom or urban renewal.

Until now.

Little by little, tourists started coming back, and now there are three trolley tours in town and so many transplants to Asheville that the visitor center has multiple racks of relocation-related brochures. New restaurants and businesses have popped up all over, some with unusual twists on the city’s history.

On the ground floor of the elegant Battery Park Hotel, one of the first luxury lodgings in the city, the Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne Bar just opened. In the spirit of thrift and recycling so prevalent in Asheville, patrons can trade their old books for new ones. Or they can embrace a more ephemeral return: Trade in their books (or just pony up some cash) for a cheese plate at the bar or a split of champagne to sip while wandering the stacks or slouching in buttery leather couches. The soft jazz on the stereo only reinforces the mood: Anyone with a few books to spare can feel like a Vanderbilt for a moment. You just need the right soundtrack, maybe.

Grand Bohemian Hotel, 11 Boston Way, 877-274-1242, bohemianhotelasheville.com. This newly opened hotel in the quaint Biltmore Village near the Biltmore entrance has hunting-lodge decor, a spa and an on-site restaurant. Rates from $189.

12 Bones Smokehouse, 5 Riverside Drive, 828-253-4499, 12bones.com. This lunch-only barbecue joint in the River Arts District has a long wait, and rightly so; the blueberry-chipotle ribs are unforgettable. Entrees $4 to $18.